(three) Friday('s ago) Happenings

OK, so maybe I wasn't as prepared for coming back to school as I thought.

Friday and Saturday were pretty hectic, so I was planning on just writing about them when we got back from Texas, but taking a week off for SXSW in the midst of midterms and class projects starts to look like a little less of a great idea on the flight home at 1:30 Monday morning when you've got class later that day. So here we are, about two weeks after SXSW ended and I'm still only up to Friday :/

Anyway, here's the rest of our adventures in a slew of hastily written posts before I forget any more details.

Who we saw on Friday:

Moth!Fight!
Bear Hands
Crystal Antlers
Cursive
The Thermals
The Hold Steady
Third Eye Blind
Dananananakroyd
Camera Obscura
Paper Chase
Sarah Jaffee
Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears

Notables:

Good God I Love Cursive! Even though the sound was a bit off (the backup vocals were WAY louder than lead) this has to be one of the best shows I've gone to so far. Between the 1/2 set we caught on Thursday and the whole set we got yesterday I heard almost all the major songs I was looking forward to.

The Thermals, again, were wholly satisfying, and to have them followed directly by The Hold Steady was seemed like the perfect continuation.

Third Eye Blind played in a venue used to shoot live concerts this week for DirectTV. It was a little strange being in a huge room with cameras whizzing by on cranes throughout the whole set, but it certainly succeeded in providing me my Third Eye Blind fix. It's got to be tough for a band like them, who most know almost exlusively from radio singles, to be expected to play the same songs over and over again, but I think they did a good job of spreading the field. By the end of it all I think they played 2 songs from each album, as well as a couple new ones. No 'semi-charmed life', although I'm pretty sure I saw a girl crying next to me during 'Jumper'. All in all it was an enjoyable experience even with a good deal of humiliation mixed in; more to come on that topic later...

Dananananakroyd, unlike Moth!Fight!, had the balls to back up their obnoxious name. Though I'm normally not a fan of the screaming-style of singing, but this group just looked like they were having so much fun on stage it was impossible not to become infected by it. Most of the time they had two lead singers, but on multiple songs, one of the singers (both of them could do this) would sit in on a second, full-sized drum kit and join in with the band flawlessly.

Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears brought it again, proving that their performance at the paste party a couple days earlier was far from a fluke, but rather was indicative of their ease in bringing a high energy and booty-shake-inducing set to any venue.